ABSTRACT
Trade diasporas in the classical world became familiar to modern western European scholars through Homer’s writings. Surprisingly, both the Iliad and the Odyssey contain generally negative views about the role of commerce. The Greeks (rather like the Romans later) preferred the ‘noble’ ideals of military conquest, plunder and colonization to trade. They relied for commercial affairs on the Phoenicians, the legendary ‘Bedouin of the sea’, who exchanged products and knowledge as far afield as Spain, Britain, Greece, Babylon, Persepolis and Thebes. Used of the Phoenicians in early modern history, the expression diaspora was revived to allude to networks of proactive merchants set up to buy and sell their goods along established trade routes. This drew the meaning of the word closer to the Phoenician prototype.
